At a lively forum in Chicago, David Axelrod, David Brooks, Rahm Emanuel, and others discuss the 2012 election, Facebook, and more.

CHICAGO -- They weren't as surprised as Newt Gingrich presumably was with word that an ex-wife was going public about matters of the heart and loins.

But Rachel Maddow, David Brooks, George Stephanopoulos, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel were briefly silenced Thursday when a discussion on politics at the University of Chicago was interrupted by two protesters unhappy with the mayor.

Grievances intelligible only to locals were declaimed from an auditorium balcony and halted an already lively gathering which saw Mitt Romney tagged "the tallest midget" in the Republican field and President Obama accused of having "snookered" one of the assembled pundits. But the outburst provided unintended affirmation of the raison d'être, as university eggheads might put it, for the gathering: unveiling a new Institute of Politics to be headed by David Axelrod, the journalist-turned-political consultant and top re-election adviser to Obama.

As the protesters railed, one realized how Emanuel, the lone working politician on stage, must confront arduous choices daily as he manages big-city decline amid shrinking revenues, staggering pension obligations, high unemployment, and a culture of high expectations which can't be met.

When confronted in more civil fashion about controversial moves during a question-and-answer portion, he adeptly deflated his critic in the audience with a measured, systematic explanation of the balancing act he'd confronted and why he did what he did.

"Don't curse the outcome" of elections, "change the outcome," Axelrod said earlier in detailing his purpose in creating a nonpartisan institute which will be aimed largely at instilling undergraduates with an interest and sophistication in how the political system does, and can, operate.

And for more than an hour, a standing-room-only assemblage glimpsed bright practitioners and observers providing a tiny preview of a gambit that won't actually materialize until next year. What amounts to a quasi-challenge to the Kennedy School at Harvard will go through a year-long gestation period as Axelrod completes what he says is his last campaign and then settles down at his alma mater, thinking big and relying on an ample Rolodex.

No surprise: Romney and Obama were in the spotlight Thursday, even if there was scant consensus.

"I sort of feel like he's the tallest midget," Maddow said of the Republican frontrunner. "I think he will win by virtue of the fact that his competitors suck."

Castellanos, who worked for Romney as an adviser during his failed 2008 campaign for the Republican nomination, was short of ringing in his defense of his onetime client. He's the only candidate who can win on the GOP side, he said, because Gingrich, "the only guy who can compete with Romney," has a plateau when it comes to getting votes. He said he expects the former speaker will collapse either before or after this weekend's South Carolina primary, even if he is "harder to kill than Rasputin."

"David Axelrod doesn't want a referendum on the president," Castellanos said as Axelrod sat in the front row with his family and top university officials. Romney is hard to love but also hard to hate, Castellanos argued. "There's a lot of Styrofoam in him."

If anybody in a rather savvy, mostly invitation-only audience somehow hadn't realized it, Emanuel is a pretty shrewd, if at times acidic, practitioner -- all the caricatures as a bombastic and profane political gunslinger aside. Repeatedly deriding Romney as "Mr. Fix-It," he said with almost professorial certitude that the best Republican candidate isn't even in the field: those would have been either New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels.

Brooks was a bit chagrined by the uninspired consensus around Romney and made an intriguing case that the very characteristics he is criticized for now -- coming off as an "organization man" and bloodless consultant -- will be strengths among prospective moderate and independent voters in a general election. That will be especially true, he suggested, if Obama makes what he thinks is a fatal tactical error and continues to tack to the left and bash the supposedly notorious "1 percent" of Americans who are wealthy.

"People don't want to talk about inequality, they want to talk about opportunity," Brooks said. When he addresses a joint session of Congress next week, Obama should not give a reprise of a recent Kansas speech, hailed by many liberals as a passionate, Franklin Roosevelt-like call for greater economic fairness.

Maddow and Emanuel fenced over a corollary to that argument, namely whether the thrust of that speech -- and, by extension, the campaign -- should focus on the inspirational. Maddow suggested that, as a nation, "we're a little inspirationed out" and that people need to have their faith restored in government's basic competence. She was thoughtful on what is most assuredly derision toward government, how politics plays such a small role in many citizens' lives, and the way in which conservatives have succeeded in framing so much of the public discussion and portraying most politicians as "scumbags."

A smaller-bore oration, she feels, would be the way to go, underscoring the actual things a government can do.

"I'm sort of ready to hear a Cash for Clunkers speech," she said, alluding to the short-lived government program which provided an incentive to trade in low-mileage, four-wheeled disasters.

Emanuel, who served Obama for two eventful years as chief of staff, flatly disagreed. Swing for the fences rhetorically, he suggested, especially since it's the last "unfiltered speech" before a huge television audience the president can give until, in all probability, his convention acceptance address.

As for being "snookered," well, that came from Brooks, who has written a fair number of columns solicitous of the president. A University of Chicago graduate and former Chicago journalist, just like his friend Axelrod, he said some people like the "liberal Barack Obama" but that he'd been drawn to a more empirical and sober and academic Obama. He called that Obama a "Reinhold Niebuhr, University of Chicago Barack Obama," a reference to the American theologian (who actually attended Elmhurst College in the Chicago suburbs).

"I've come to the conclusion I was snookered," he said, prompting Emanuel to jump in with the intriguing notion that it wasn't an either-or dichotomy. In fact, he suggested, he finds both strains in his former boss and doesn't see many contradictions.

Stephanopoulos was a predictably superior moderator, at times adding observations from his tenure as an aide to President Bill Clinton. He also reminded one and all of the likely legislative tsunami that confronts Congress next January when fish-or-cut-bait decisions must be made on the debt ceiling, tax cuts, and spending. Emanuel, a rather successful dealmaker, thought that solutions will be found at those deadlines but didn't seem to persuade many others.

And there certainly wasn't any initial consensus between Maddow and Castellanos when it came to the United States military. In a most intriguing exchange, Maddow was miffed at a Castellanos suggestion that a rigid Republican Party in need of new blood should be less like the Army and more like Facebook. Fox News diehards would surely have been taken aback, pleasantly, by the MSNBC anchor's ringing defense of a new generation of American soldiers. Younger Americans she speaks with, she said, have a distinct reverence for those talented soldiers, so it's wayward to chide the Republican Party for being somehow too much like the Army for a top-down approach to operations -- especially given the many smart, young citizens in its ranks.

And don't use Facebook as shorthand for vision, vitality and flexibility, she essentially declared, especially when that younger generation is distinctly worried about the perils of Facebook, including intrusions into their privacy. She may not have been totally persuasive: a number of smart chroniclers of the digital world cite both a lack of such wariness and a clear disregard for precision and facts among younger citizens.

Still, it was the sort of provocative exchange that Axelrod surely hopes is ingrained in his future institute. Come to think of it, maybe he can invite Gingrich and the ex-wife to discuss "Politics and Privacy: Running for Office in a Facebook World."

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”